27/6/07

This exercise, which is supposed to be conducted in the morning (as preparation for a day of production), fails at precisely that time because the start of the day crowds your head with thoughts of responsibilities - largely non-existent ones - and of longings or regrets. The latter, a wistful, remorseful daydreaming, seems particularly well entrenched, and could be, indeed probably is, the whole reason for your presence here, as well as conceivably for some of the more important events of your life. You need to keep in mind that the purpose of the regret is to induce the state of distracted, dreamy remembrance, a revisiting and reshaping of events that now exist safely in the past, rather than the other way round (that is, regret is not a consequence of dreaming, but its cause). It is, in other words, a means of producing stasis and inactivity, and of thwarting the old enemy, change. And consider how many of your friends and family also fear change, perhaps even more than you do. Your collective fear reinforces, or at least confirms, each other's, and you all become engaged together in a vain exercise: resisting the passage of time by keeping everything the same; rather like effecting a symbolic death in order to outwit a real one.
What is the way out of this? You had always assumed the answer to be: work ('real' work, as opposed to the mere earning of money), but this is probably an illusion, or at least not the whole truth. The answer, of course, is that no one thing can provide a way out, but rather a process, one that presumably does not consist in instrumentalising your life towards some single goal or purpose (which itself will provide ample opportunities for postponement, for putting things off one way or another). This is presumably true even of political and 'intellectual' engagement or of artistic 'creation'. Or rather, these latter can only successfully follow on from the 'process', they cannot establish it. Why is it that most, if not all, of you adult life has been spent running before you could walk, or as a paraplegic with ambitions of becoming a tightrope walker? The putting of the cart before the horse has been as much a theme as 'lack of commitment' (which might in some respects be regarded as 'over-commitment'). It implies both lack of confidence and an overweening excess of it; the two being strangely related in a manner you have yet to define properly.